Stet

Are we in the last days of the newsroom copy editors? The NYT's Lawrence Downes thinks so:

The job hasn’t disappeared yet, but it is swiftly evolving, away from an emphasis on style and consistency, from making a physical object perfect the first time. The path to excellence is now through speed, agility and creativity in using multiple expressive outlets for information in all its shapes and sounds.

As newspapers lose money and readers, they have been shedding great swaths of expensive expertise. They have been forced to shrink or eliminate the multiply redundant levels of editing that distinguish their kind of journalism from what you find on TV, radio and much of the Web. Copy editors are being bought out or forced out; they are dying and not being replaced.

Webby doesn’t necessarily mean sloppy, of course, and online news operations will shine with all the brilliance that the journalists who create them can bring. But in that world of the perpetual present tense — post it now, fix it later, update constantly — old-time, persnickety editing may be a luxury in which only a few large news operations will indulge. It will be an artisanal product, like monastery honey and wooden yachts.

Comments

[James]

So...that's why the same ten stories are updated ten times a day in my NYT's feed...

[Laura]

This is frightening as all hell ...

I can't believe I missed this article. It's only further evidence of the dumbing down of the English language ... if we can't trust the news we read to have consistency provided by persnickety editors, the way we speak is going to change vastly and the way we teach our children to communicate will change even more so. This is a generation already embracing text-messaging and speaking in abbreviations out loud (lol, omg, etc.) ... it might seem persnickety, but I think some traditions exist for very good reasons and people often underestimate the culture-changing effects of language.

But then I'm probably just a bitter copy editor.